Whether you're sitting in the same room, across campus, or in different countries, you can collaborate with others using Google Docs & Spreadsheets. If you're using the application, and you live outside the U.S. or you're working with people outside of the U.S., we'd love to hear from you about what you're up to. So far we've heard from authors, college students, dragstrip operators, police officers, and even fantasy baseball league members.

Post your story here in our Google Group and while you're at it, check out other stories as well.

Have you ever come across a link to a document on the web and wished you could open it directly with Google Docs & Spreadsheets? The process until now has been somewhat convoluted -- you needed to save the file to your desktop, then upload it to Google Docs & Spreadsheets. What a drag. Wouldn't it be nice to save a few steps, and turn that drag into drag-and-drop? Thanks to our friends on the Google Toolbar team, you can.

We just launched Google Toolbar 3 Beta for Firefox, and it includes some very cool features for Google Docs & Spreadsheets users. With those features enabled, you can open most popular file types in Google D&S. Clicking a link to a file on a web page will open the document directly in your browser window. Even cooler, you can drag file icons from your desktop to your browser and have them automatically imported into D&S. Once you've installed the beta, enable these features from the "Options" menu of your Toolbar.

Being able to drag and drop files directly has really streamlined my day. Maybe I can even use that free time to catch up on my holiday shopping. And since you asked, Google Docs & Spreadsheets is a handy way to manage your shopping lists!

As a web application, Google Docs & Spreadsheets can do all sorts of neat things. Of course, easy sharing and collaborative editing are the most obvious benefits, but this young puppy is learning some new tricks (of course, I'll mention the two closest to my heart first ;-) ).

One is GoogleLookup, which attempts to answer your questions by using information from the web. You can use it for all kinds of party tricks, like looking up the population of New York City [=GoogleLookup("New York City", "population")] or when Google was founded [=googlelookup("google", "founded")]. Try it to see what other things you can look up. I'll warn you in advance, it's a bit addicting. If you mouse over the cell, you'll see links to the source pages where we found the data, so you can always check out the primary sources. And don't forget you can copy/paste (ctrl-c / ctrl-v) the formula to other cells to easily have a bunch of GoogleLookups in a sheet. Don't expect to change the world with this function, but have fun with it.

While GoogleLookup covers a little bit of everything, its sibling GoogleFinance focuses just on financial data from Google Finance. Using a similar syntax, you can look up the price of Google stock [=GoogleFinance("GOOG")] or the 52-week high of Apple [=GoogleFinance("AAPL", "HIGH52")]. And since stock prices tend to change more often than, say, the capital of California does, we update them in your spreadsheet automatically. So if you leave your portfolio spreadsheet open, you should see numbers get updated as you would on Google Finance itself. Of course, we also have the same 20-minute delay on financial data.

So as GoogleLookup and Google Finance let you pull data from the web into your spreadsheet, we've also make it easier to put your data back out onto the web by publishing it. If you go to the "Publish" tab at the upper-right of your spreadsheet, you can publish your entire spreadsheet (or just one sheet of it) so that other people can view it as HTML, PDF, or even as an Atom or RSS feed. You can finally share your spreadsheets with others without them having to sign in to their Google Account. And if you go to the "more publishing options" link, you'll find some other cool options (duh!).

Besides a few other handy small features, there's one more worth mentioning: revisions. If you (or one of your 'trusted collaborators') makes a mistake in a spreadsheet which our usually-friendly autosave feature picks up, you can go back to prior versions of your spreadsheet using the "Revisions" tab. That'll come in handy, I promise.

We're winding up our Global Warming Student Speakout project with a full-page ad in USA Today (11/27/06). This project was in many ways an experiment: can hundreds of students of all ages and from all around the world kick out ideas on combating global warming...in real-time...in record time...and do it online using Google Docs & Spreadsheets? The answer is a resounding YES, I am very happy to say.

We got super-positive feedback from the 80+ schools who participated in the project, and of course all the kids are excited that their schools and ideas will be in the spotlight in the ad. (I'm not sure what page the ad will be on...all I know is that it won't be in the sports section ;-} ) I'll be raiding my local newspaper stand to pick up all the issues I can carry back to the team first thing tomorrow AM!

Check out this example of one Romanian school's brainstorm results in a published Google document...complete with student artwork that complements the class' ideas. And here's a nice anecdote from (coincidentally) another Romanian teacher who organized her class' participation in the project:

"I must confess that they [the students] were extremely enthusiastic. They really liked the fact that they had to brainstorm during the classes and then edit the document on their computers at home. During the brainstorming, which was indeed a real "storm", they came up with a lot of ideas."

-- Ioana Pecheanu, a high school teacher at Vasile Alecsandri National College in Galati, Romania

This one has consistently been a top feature request for a looooong time, so we're really excited to have finished it. The document spellcheck now supports more than 30 languages, and we think it's a better quality spellcheck than our old one (it's the same one that Gmail uses, actually).

2 new views of your docs & spreadsheets

For the folks out there who have LOTS of documents and spreadsheets, you can now choose to display only documents, or only spreadsheets. Check out these new "All Documents" and "All Spreadsheets" options from the green-highlighted Browse Docs & Spreadsheets drop-down menu.

Anyone who has ever helped to launch a new beta product knows that the team obsessively seeks out every article or review, wondering, "Will it be a TRICK or a TREAT?" Happily, we got a big treat last week when PC Magazine gave Google Docs & Spreadsheets 4 out of 5 stars.

The part I love best about that article is that it says we're "bug-free." Wow, a beta product that's bug-free! (That would be a first, wouldn't it?) If you ever run across what you think might be a bug in Google Docs & Spreadsheets, please first check out our searchable Help Group where outstandingly helpful users like Gill and ahab share their opinions and expertise with other folks, including those of us on the product development side. If you don't see the topic of the issue addressed there or in the Help Center, please contact our support team.

We now have lots of schools participating in our Global Warming Student Speakout from each of the locations listed below. We just extended the deadline for participation to this Friday -- November 3rd -- and we're hoping to get participation from even more locations this week.

November elections in the U.S. are right around the corner - November 7 is just a few weeks away. One issue that transcends any particular election and any particular country is global warming - it happens to be an issue that Google cares a lot about. It's also an issue that affects younger generations more gravely than older ones. But what (you're asking) has any of this got to do with Google Docs & Spreadsheets?

It turns out that lots of students use Google Docs & Spreadsheets, and most of them aren't old enough to vote. So we've come up with a project, in partnership with Global SchoolNet, that gives students a voice on the critical issue of global warming. We're inviting teachers and students to brainstorm strategies for fighting global warming, and have their ideas published in a full-page ad in The Washington Post following national elections.

We're hoping that this project (which is running October 17 to November 3) both helps students learn about global warming and gives them a fun brainstorming and idea sharing experience using Google Docs & Spreadsheets. If you are interested in participating, check out the project announcement and details on the Google for Educators web site.

I'm pregnant with twins. Twin boys, that is. At first, I was pretty terrified at the prospect. I'm already a mom - I have a 3 year-old girl at home - so I have an inkling of the sleep deprivation and domestic chaos that awaits me with the birth of these boys. But then I got to thinking -- ultimately, it will be fabulous! The boys will have each other throughout their lives. They'll be thick as thieves, blood brothers, constant companions. They'll look out for each other and help each other out of (hopefully minor and infrequent) scrapes.

Odd how one's personal life and work life sometimes mirror one another, isn't it? I've been working on two product teams here at Google: Writely, the Web word processor, and Google Spreadsheets. Writely was born as a start-up in August 2005 and joined the Google family in March this year. And Google Spreadsheets was born in Google Labs this past June. Today these two products begin a new life together as Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

The combination of documents and spreadsheets is a natural one. I think of documents as right-brain (a blank canvas for free-form writing) and spreadsheets as left-brain (a structured framework for lists and data). Different people use one or the other for the same thing. For example, if you were compiling a shopping list, would you prefer to do it in a document or a spreadsheet? I'd use a document ... you might use a spreadsheet ... it just depends on which format feels more comfortable and better suited for the task at hand.

We've completely re-jiggered Writely and Google Spreadsheets so they're more identical than fraternal, and unified the two with one login, one help center and a joint list that shows all your documents and spreadsheets online. I hope you'll find these changes as useful and exciting as we do!